- To put the matter more succinctly, the claims inform a
relevant audience about certain laws of nature; any additional steps consist of
wellunderstood, routine, conventional activity already engaged in by the
scientific community; and those steps, when viewed as a whole, add nothing
significant beyond the sum of their parts taken separately. For these reasons we believe that the steps
are not sufficient to transform unpatentable natural correlations into
patentable applications of those regularities.
- [T]o transform an unpatentable law of nature into a patent-eligible application of such a law, one must do more than simply state the law of nature while adding the words “apply it.”
- The question before us is whether the claims do significantly more than simply describe these natural relations. To put the matter more precisely, do the patent claims add enough to their statements of the correlations to allow the processes they describe to qualify as patent-eligible processes that apply natural laws?
- If a law of nature is not patentable, then neither is a process reciting a law of nature, unless that process has additional features that provide practical assurance that the process is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the law of nature itself.
CLS BANK v. ALICE CORP.
- The abstractness of the “abstract ideas” test to patent eligibility has become a serious problem, leading to great uncertainty and to the devaluing of inventions of practical utility and economic potential.
- Notwithstanding these well intentioned efforts and the great volume of pages in the Federal Reporters treating the abstract ideas exception, the dividing line between inventions that are directed to patent ineligible abstract ideas and those that are not remains elusive.
- While every inventor is granted the right to exclude, or “pre-empt,” others from practicing his or her claimed invention, no one is entitled to claim an exclusive right to a fundamental truth or disembodied concept that would foreclose every future innovation in that art.
- [T]he essential concern is not preemption, per se, but the extent to which preemption results in the foreclosure of innovation. Claims that are directed to no more than a fundamental truth and foreclose, rather than foster, future innovation are not directed to patent eligible subject matter under § 101. No one can claim the exclusive right to all future inventions.
- The mere implementation on a computer of an otherwise ineligible abstract idea will not render the asserted “invention” patent eligible.
- It can ... be appreciated that a claim that is drawn to a specific way of doing something with a computer is likely to be patent eligible whereas a claim to nothing more than the idea of doing that thing on a computer may not.
- But even with that appreciation, great uncertainty remains, and the core of that uncertainty is the meaning of the “abstract ideas” exception.
- Any claim can be stripped down, or simplified, removing all of its concrete limitations, until at its core, something that could be characterized as an abstract idea is revealed. But nothing in the Supreme Court’s precedent, nor in ours, allows a court to go hunting for abstractions by ignoring the concrete, palpable, tangible, and otherwise not abstract invention the patentee actually claims. It is fundamentally improper to paraphrase a claim in overly simplistic generalities in assessing whether the claim falls under the limited “abstract ideas” exception to patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Patent eligibility must be evaluated based on what the claims recite, not merely on the ideas upon which they are premised.
- In light of the foregoing, this court holds that when—after taking all of the claim recitations into consideration—it is not manifestly evident that a claim is directed to a patent ineligible abstract idea, that claim must not be deemed for that reason to be inadequate under § 101.
- Unless the single most reasonable understanding is that a claim is directed to nothing more than a fundamental truth or disembodied concept, with no limitations in the claim attaching that idea to a specific application, it is inappropriate to hold that the claim is directed to a patent ineligible “abstract idea” under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
CLASSEN IMMUNOTHERAPIES, INC. V. BIOGEN IDEC
- Methods that simply collect and compare data, without applying the data in a step of the overall method, may fail to traverse the §101 filter.
- The ’283 claims do not include putting this knowledge to practical use, but are directed to the abstract principle that variation in immunization schedules may have consequences for certain diseases. In contrast, the claims of the ’139 and ’739 patents require the further act of immunization in accordance with a lower-risk schedule, thus moving from abstract scientific principle to specific application.
- The computer limitation [in this case] … does not play a significant part in permitting the claimed method to be performed. … At the claim construction stage, AML agreed that “using a computer” merely meant “operating an electronic device that features a central processing unit.” Such a broad and general limitation does not impose meaningful limits on the claim’s scope. AML simply added a computer limitation to claims covering an abstract concept—that is, the computer limitation is simply insignificant post-solution activity.
